{"id":164,"date":"2006-10-16T17:46:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-16T23:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/2006\/10\/16\/ufc-and-the-old-ultraviolence\/"},"modified":"2006-10-16T17:46:00","modified_gmt":"2006-10-16T23:46:00","slug":"ufc-and-the-old-ultraviolence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/2006\/10\/16\/ufc-and-the-old-ultraviolence\/","title":{"rendered":"ufc and the old ultraviolence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>given my pop culture avocations, people can’t understand why i’ve never plugged into the cable<\/em>. just when i think i really need <\/em>cnn or comedy central, however, i flip channels in a hotel room and see something too horrible for words. such is the case with [warning:<\/strong> the following link is brutal] ultimate fighting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

i raise the issue because i spoke this weekend with an intelligent young woman who attended a pay-per-view UFC<\/a> event with her boyfriend. when i asked what she liked about it, she pointed to “passion” and the faces of the participants. dang. they’d get as much passion and intensity watching a good guitar face<\/a> at the local bar.<\/p>\n

but she’s not alone, and that’s got me worried. ultimate fighting is outdrawing<\/a> the baseball playoffs among males age 18-34. is this<\/a> the state of american masculinity in 2006? i’ll summarize a spike tv <\/em>bout i saw while traveling this summer: palooka A knocks palooka B into chain-link fence, straddles B’s chest, and pounds face until some savagery threshold is crossed (unconsciousness? a two-quart blood rule?), whereupon A is declared the victor. i’ve seen more civilized fights in prison yards.<\/p>\n

after one has physically dominated an opponent, doesn’t man law<\/a> dictate mercy? or is mercy the crucial distinction between ultimate <\/em>fighting and plain vanilla penultimate<\/em> fighting? somewhere along the line i picked up the idea that a man doesn’t continue hitting or kicking a fallen <\/em>opponent into unconsciousness, or immobilize him and then <\/em>cave in his face with elbow shots.<\/p>\n

i admit that i’m the wrong guy to cluck about this, given my own conflicted history with violence. among my edumacated friends, i’m a lonely defender <\/em>of disciplined and attenuated violent forms such as football, rugby, and wrestling — and i continue to applaud my significantly larger<\/a> lad’s participation in such activities. if anything, he’s learned discipline and control in these sports. to my knowledge, at least, he has yet to throw a punch in anger.<\/p>\n

i lost my stomach for boxing after boom-boom mancini v. duk-koo kim<\/a><\/em>, but i’ll admit that i’ve probably participated<\/em><\/a> in more violence than most sociologists or criminologists. on the other hand, with the possible exception of murray straus<\/a>, i also watch <\/em>far less of it than any sociologist or criminologist i know. i’ve simply got no time for the phony played-out bloodfests by scorcese and tarantino. i’ll grant you that straw dogs<\/em>, mean streets<\/em>, and clockwork<\/em><\/a> <\/em>may have had something important to say. but thirty years later i’m amazed that critics, most of whom have neither thrown nor taken a punch, still <\/em>lap up the same old tired movie tropes as authentic.<\/em><\/p>\n

i work hard as a criminologist because i want a little more Justice and a whole lot less violence in the world. for me, real violence is only interesting in the way that hiv\/aids and earthquakes are interesting. but that’s a rant for another day. ultimate fighting strikes me as straight-up pornography, perhaps a step or two below cockfighting on the debasement scale. as long as i’ve got kids in the house and comcast is pushing UFC (and, frankly, i could throw goodfellas<\/em> and reservoir dogs <\/em>in there as well), they’ll just have to make do without me. i see an ugly human transaction whenever two human beings come to blows, made all the uglier by money and spectators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

given my pop culture avocations, people can’t understand why i’ve never plugged into the cable. just when i think i really need cnn or comedy central, however, i flip channels in a hotel room and see something too horrible for words. such is the case with [warning: the following link is brutal] ultimate fighting. i […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}